London - An American man says he has a 14-year-old McDonald’s hamburger - and it looks exactly the same as the day he bought it.
David Whipple told daytime talk TV show The Doctors that he had been hoping to demonstrate the high levels of preservatives in fast food.
He says he bought the hamburger from a McDonald’s outlet way back in 1999. But he claims he then forgot about it, finding it two years later in an old coat pocket. He then decided to continue the experiment, and, 14 years on, the hamburger remains unchanged.
It has no signs of mould, fungus or even a strange odour. The only thing that has changed over the years is that the pickle has disintegrated.
Whipple, from Utah, said that he never meant the experiment to last this long. “It wasn’t on purpose,” he said on The Doctors.
“I was showing some people how enzymes work and I thought a hamburger would be a good idea. And I used it for a month and then I forgot about it. It ended up in a paper sack with the receipt in my coat pocket tossed in the back of my truck and it sat there for, I don’t know, two or three months.”
The coat was then hung up in a closet at his home.
“My wife didn’t discover it until at least a year or two after that,” he said. “And we pulled it out and said ‘oh my gosh. I can’t believe it looks the same way’.”
Whipple, who still has what he says is the original receipt for the burger, said he now shows it to his grandchildren to encourage them to eat healthily. “It’s great for my grand-kids to see. To see what happens with fast food,” he said.
In 2009, nutritionist Joann Bruso decide to keep a McDonald’s Happy Meal uncovered on a shelf for a year. Apart from a few cracks in the bun, it remained unchanged. “Food is supposed to decompose, go bad and smell foul eventually,” she wrote on her blog.
“The fact that it has not decomposed shows you how unhealthy it is for children.” - Daily Mail